The hero’s journey

I acted in film and television, performed improv live, and wrote and directed short films. For 15 years, I connected with a character’s feelings, found the universal truth in a story, and wrote the human experience for a visual medium.

When I started working in tech, I noticed that people talked about customers as if they were the audience of a movie we’re making, rather than the hero of the products we’re developing. In contrast, I approached it like studying a character, putting myself in the customer’s shoes and imagining how they would think or feel in a given moment. But I found that the language of storytelling wasn’t used in the design process.

Our innate storytelling skills

We’re all storytellers. Humans have an innate desire and ability to describe our experience of the world in story. It’s how our brains understand, remember, and communicate important pieces of information. When we think in stories, we’re engaged and connected to our humanity and those around us.

I wanted to help designers tap into their creativity and think of customers as the hero of the experiences we were building. So I created a workshop that used screenwriting basics to outline a ”movie” with the customer as the protagonist. I developed five key elements of a script and asked participants to imagine how our products could improve the lives of customers. My goal was to change the question from How do we get people to change their behavior? to How do we empower people to achieve their biggest dreams? The stories they came up with, and the passion they showed in advocating for their hero, told me I was onto something.

I’ve given this workshop many times at Dropbox and other companies, but it was first used for a real project in 2021. We kicked off a vision project for the Growth team with two workshops that would help drive the roadmap for 2022 and beyond.

When we planned our work asking how we could empower customers to make their dreams come true, we prioritized the right things. Our roadmap aligned company objectives with customer objectives more easily. The customer as hero helped us better understand our product’s place in their lives.

Transformation as a goal

The hero of a movie is the one who transforms. The other characters are there to support or hinder their transformation. We talk a lot about what our customers want to do with our products, but we also need to ask why. Once we understand that, we can figure out how to support their transformation.

I ran two workshops with designers from across Dropbox to inform the Growth vision. We used data about our customers, compiled by the Research team, to get started. We knew what customers were trying to accomplish and what kind of work they were doing, but we hadn’t yet explored the why. The first workshop focused on creating stories in which people transformed their lives. Dropbox wasn’t in those stories. In the second workshop, we added research about buying behavior to the characters. Then we wrote Dropbox and its product solutions into the customer’s story, without making it about us. In that way, we transformed data into stories and stories into experiences.

We watch film and TV shows primarily because they take us on a journey of transformation, risk free. But our customers’ lives are not risk free. They have fears, constraints, and circumstances that inform their decisions and their experience of our products.

Using story to challenge assumptions

Iris Lin, a product designer at Dropbox, participated in the first workshop. A fan of storytelling in film and TV, she thought the framework could serve as an effective way for her Dropbox Replay team to align on their goals. Replay is a new product for managing video projects, and the team members were figuring out where to focus their efforts in the next quarter.

Iris worked with her team to create personal stories for two common Replay user types: Naomi, who works at a media company as part of a marketing team, and Alfie, who works remotely as a freelance video editor. Naomi makes short-form social media videos, and her company already uses Dropbox for storage, so it’s easy for her to move files into Replay. The team imagines most customers using the product this way. Alfie, however, doesn’t use the product this way.

Alfie‘s raw video assets are much larger than Naomi’s, and he can’t afford to lose performance when they’re syncing. So he stores them on an external hard drive while working on rough cuts with editing software on his computer. When he’s ready to share and get feedback, he uploads directly to Replay and never syncs with Dropbox. This method works well for Alfie. He primarily needs a more streamlined feedback process, which has been taking far too much of his time.

This was an aha moment for Iris and her team members. They realized that they can’t assume Replay users will start their workflows in Dropbox, or that it’s a problem the team needs to fix. Before this exercise, the team’s focus would have been on the create and edit phases, trying to get Alfie to change his behavior by storing and opening files in Dropbox. Instead, Alfie’s story revealed that the team could best help him achieve his goals by streamlining the review phase in Replay and then connecting him with tools that help deliver his final work in the approve phase.

The best friend in the movie

That’s when Iris realized that the relationship between Dropbox and Alfie is like Ned, Spider-Man’s “guy in the chair.” In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Ned brags in the interrogation room that he “literally helped [Spider-Man] find The Vulture, helped him hack a suit once, and kind of helped him get to space.” The best friend doesn’t have their own agenda; they exist to help the hero achieve the hero’s goals.

The best friend sees the hero’s potential and supports them on their journey. They rarely tell the hero what to do. They may nudge the hero in a certain direction or show them things they need to see, but never in a way that upstages, derails, or outsmarts them.

After using the Customer As Hero framework with her team, Iris developed these three principles for using it in the design process:

1. Recognize the customer, not Dropbox, as the hero
2. Deeply understand their journey and where Dropbox products can play a supporting role
3. Align on the why of what you’re building, and how it can help the hero’s transformation

The five key elements

Understanding our role as a supporting character allows us to design with more empathy and curiosity and a much better barometer of success.

In the workshop, we imagine and write five key elements in the hero’s journey. The hero is written first, followed by the ending. Then we can determine the transformation that needs to occur to reach the ending. From there, we add details in the setup and hook to give the journey extra punch. Told in order, these five elements make up the inspiring story of the hero, whose life is transformed by our product.

- Hero

Who is the hero of this story and what do they want? What’s keeping them from getting it?

These simple questions can be the hardest for people to answer. We know so much about our customer—what they do for a living, what kind of problems they have, and how our products solve their problems. But we don’t often ask what they really want in life.

What makes them feel happy and fulfilled? What gives their life meaning? Who is important to them? These are the things that influence how people make decisions and motivate them to change.

- Setup

What can the hero expect in this story? What’s their emotional state before the transformation?

This is another important consideration in product design. What kind of experience will it provide? Will it be fun or serious, short or long, simple or complex? Can I acknowledge their emotional state and ensure they’ll get what they expect?

- Hook

When is the moment the hero realizes this story might transform their life?

This is the first sign that transformation is possible, or that something interesting is about to happen. We always need to think about how to hook people into investing time in the product, and ask whether the payoff will be worth it.

- Transformation

What’s the big change from the beginning to the end? What has the hero realized?

Maybe something they believed possible is better than they imagined. Or something they thought impossible actually isn’t. This is the moment when people watching a movie want to cheer. The hero of our product experience should feel excited and be racing to the ending.

- Ending

What has the hero achieved by the end of the story? How do they feel? Who are they with?

When we think about the customer’s life holistically, the ending will result in the their transformation—the moment they overcome their obstacles and get what they want.